Remote Health Monitoring System Using Microcontroller—Suitable for Rural and Elderly Patients

Amid and post-COVID-19 pandemic, the matter of being in touch with patients to monitor their health matrices became somewhat challenging, especially in the rural areas of countries like Bangladesh and for elderlies. To address this issue, a patient health monitoring system is developed using a Programmable Intelligent Computer (PIC) microcontroller and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) protocol with the help of a pulse sensor, IR sensor, photodiodes, temperature sensor, etc., to measure 3 (three) crucial health matrices such as heartbeat/pulse, oxygen saturation level, and body temperature from a fingertip of the patient in 20 s remotely. Whenever the system measures the health matrices, it sends a short message service (SMS) report to a personal caretaker over GSM automatically. If the system finds any anomaly based on predefined threshold levels for each health parameter, it sends a SMS alert report to the designated doctor automatically as well. A prototype of the developed system is made, verified, and tested to be working perfectly as designed and programmed. In the experiment with the developed system, heart rate ranged from 61 to 105 bmp, body temperature ranged from 95.3 to 99.1 ℉, and oxygen saturation was minimum at 97%. According to the set threshold levels, which led to an automatic SMS alert to the caretaker’s mobile phone.